Dennis Loy Johnson of MobyLives.com posted his weekly column, “The Disappearing Author Syndrome,” on July 15, discussing the reason so many authors are missing from the shelves of various Barnes & Noble bookstores in Manhattan. (The article link to Moby may not work past this week, since Moby archives the weekly columns with individual, rather than date-based names. Try the Archives if it’s not on the front page.)
The missing books were by authors such as “Michael Baisden, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Nick Hornby, E. Lynn Harris, Shannon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, Salmon Rusdie, Omar Tyree, Sister Souljah, Iceberg Slim, Teri Woods and Zane”, as well as J. D. Salinger, Martin Amis and Paul Auster.
Speaking to booksellers and store managers, Johnson came away with several reasons why those books are often kept behind the front register. The reasons ranged from theft to customer convenience to bookseller convenience — much easier to get a book from behind the info desk than it is to run up 4 flights of stairs.
A couple of days later, the Times runs a story called “The Best Stealer List” by Martin Arnold, discusses the most popularly stolen books downtown, which include Jack Kerouac. “… Bukowski, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Hunke. Kafka and Abbie Hoffman are also hot steals, and Tom Wolfe’s ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ is tucked away, available only on demand.” Uptown, it’s the big, expensive art and photography books.
Having worked in many bookstores over the years, including Barnes & Noble, I’d be willing to bet that the reason is more complicated than just plain theft, and more in keeping with the many reasons Johnson came up with. At B&N, we kept the “Anarchist Cookbook” behind the counter because we’d had too many irate parents returning the book while their red-faced, black-clad teenaged sons stood miserably by. We kept Jock Sturges’ “Radiant Identities” and “Last Day of Summer” behind the counter because radical Christians kept ripping out the pages of glorious black-and-white photos of naked parents and children after the FBI accused Sturges of creating and distributing child pornography. (The case was later dropped and all his materials returned to him.) We kept Howard Stern’s “Miss America” behind the counter because all the yahoos who’d never been in a bookstore or read a book before kept telling us they couldn’t find it on the incomprehensible-to-them alphabetized shelves. To be honest, our twice-a-year inventories didn’t really give us enough information to be sure that a particular title or particular author was being stolen; to me, theft is the least likely reason.
Although both articles cover the missing book problem from different angles, it’s interesting that they should both appear so close in time to one another. Does Arnold, the author of the Times’ “Making Books” column (and the subject of a nasty profile in Salon two years ago) read Moby? It would be a big surprise if he doesn’t, and a great recommendation if he does.
